russ_watters said:
Indeed: you are completely missing the point. Whether or not a theory or belief is correct has nothing at all to do with whether or not it is science or faith. What determines whether it is science or faith is the method by which it is investigated (or not investigated).
Well, I'd rather debate this in philosophy but since you insist . . .
I haven't missed the point at all if you say "What determines whether it is science or faith is the
method by which it is investigated." It is you my friend who have missed my objections because they aren't about the correctness of a belief system. They are about
claiming you are devotedly practicing a method, and then sticking articles of faith (dogma) into gaps in theories and pretending you have the evidence to warrant "most likely" status for those theories.
And the purpose of this, I claim, is to convince the world's population that science really does have all the evidence needed to pronounce reality physical/mechanical. Is it mere coincidence that if reality is only physical/mechanical, then scientists would be the gurus of all knowing?
russ_watters said:
It's the method that matters, not the conclusion. I will say, however, that one method is far more likely to result in correct answers than the other...
Look, there's no dispute about what science does do well. The dispute, for me anyway, is some scientism devotees’ ontological and epistemological claims.
russ_watters said:
However, we do know, as certainly as anything can ever be known, that intelligent design isn't just faith, it is wrong. Direct evidence contradicts it.
That's right Russ, but direct evidence contradicts abiogenesis and natural selection-accidental genetic variation being promoted as the "mostly likely" origin and development of life. That was the basis of my little hissy fit in this thread . . . that scientists are doing exactly what they are outraged at IDer's for doing.
russ_watters said:
Another big point you are missing (and I almost did) - even if you were right that religious faith or pure reason or whatever were acceptable/viable ways to investigate the natural world, it still would have no place in a science classroom. You can bash science all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that science is science and religion is religion and only science belongs in science class.
edit2: I guess that means you also are missing the point of the ID "theorist" - they claim that ID is science. You, at least, seem to accept that it is not.
Again, you misunderstand me. I don't think religious faith or pure reason are viable ways to investigate the natural world (and I assume by "natural" you mean physical because it hasn't been established that all that's natural has to be physical). I think science is the proper way to investigate the physical world.
BUT . . . when in the science classroom the teachers and textbooks offer improbable physicalistic explanations for gaps in "natural" theories, then they themselves have opened the door to a non-scientific competitor coming in and saying “wait a damn minute.” If they were sticking to what science has actually discovered, that would be different. But that isn't the case.
In this thread . . .
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=93364
I started challenging the dubious tactics of scientism here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=93364&page=4
There the discussion broadened from religious ID to whether or not there might be benefits from adding some sort of universal intelligence to origin of life and evolution models. I suggested calling that concept
intelligence assisted (IA). IA is relevant to teaching science for only one reason; I claim that what is being taught as science is not “pure” science, but incessantly includes physicalist ontology where there are significant gaps in a scientific theory. I’ve generalized the physicalist ontologizing as when the most significant gaps are filled by hypothesized physical behaviors which are both utterly uncharacteristic of physicalness, and there’s no observation that physicalness can behave in such uncharacteristic ways.
The problem is, scientists, of whom 90% are atheists, and acting like their theories for the gaps are all but proven, and they are putting that in textbooks. Yet there is no proper evidence to indicate the level of certainty they claim. For example (I will take comments from the above thread):
Yes, there are Biblical creationists trying sneak their silly beliefs in. But here's the other side of it. You know that anti-materialist effort you are critical of? Well, materialists have been using the cloak of "science" to sneak their beliefs in, and one thing they are doing is exaggerating the evidence they have for evolution. I don’t know if you have followed this thread, but the bald truth is, the mechanisms science claims can account for the evolution of all life (genetic variation and natural selection) have never been observed doing anything more than making superficial adjustments to an organism. So tell me, why is every textbook on the planet packed with descriptions like what I took from a UC Berkeley website describing "lifting functional constraints through duplication":
"Even when a feature is absolutely necessary for survival it can be modified by natural selection for a different function if it is duplicated. For example, globin is a truly ancient protein. Billions of years old, it was present in the common ancestor of bacteria, plants, animals, and fungi. Globin performed an essential job: binding and carrying oxygen. You might imagine that natural selection would lock globin into that one job; however, through duplication and divergence, different copies of the globin molecule were adapted for different roles."
Now tell me, how does the author know natural selection achieved that? Natural selection has
never been observed achieving such sophistication, so it is an unproven assumption which rather than being taught as theory is presented as fact. The student reading that doesn't know it is an unconfirmed assumption, and so universities are turning out all sorts of "believers" who think when they talk evolution their beliefs are supported by the facts (as I once did).
. . . on the one hand you have certain (not all) holier-than-thou scientists banding together to fight the evil IDers, while they themselves pretend to have evidence they really don’t in order to propagate physicalism in the guise of science. Further, they employ McCarthyish tactics to, as Tisthammerw points out, demonize one side, and then wrap themselves in the scientific flag so they can force their theory down the world’s throat.
Here is how I characterized the evidence science actually has in a post to Evo (edited for clarity):
Let’s say you went to a planet that was so hot you had to have an air conditioner to survive. Once there you meet air conditioner repairmen who have an evolutionary theory to account for all the air conditioners found around the planet. That is, they claim air conditioners originated by organizing themselves into a functioning system, and then evolved by adapting to temperature conditions.
Their evidence that the air conditioners evolved is that all contain thermostats, which do cause air conditioners to adapt. They say, “see, there is an adaptive mechanism, so that’s what is most likely the cause of evolution.” And then to explain how the first air conditioner got organized, they throw parts of the conditioner in a box and observe a magnet and a spring hooking up, and then say, “see, the magnet and spring have self-organized, and since they are part of the building blocks of an air conditioner, that is most likely how the first air conditioner got organized.”
Next the repairmen say "the evidence is overwhelming." However, what they mean by overwhelming is that a thermostat can be found in millions and millions of air conditioners. Since they've not shown that thermostats alone can evolve an air conditioner, what "overwhelming" amounts to is huge pile of exactly the same unsubstantiated claim.
Now air conditioner repairmen are geniuses at working with air conditioners, and the whole planet depends on them. So when they claim they have all the evidence needed to explain the origin and development of air conditioners, a great many people accept it as true based repairmen’s demonstrated ability overall. What people don’t realize is that the repairmen, enthralled with their own profession, have elevated air conditionerism to lofty heights, and are now preaching it as a religion, not as a fact.
There Evo is a ruse worthy of the Con Job Hall of Fame, far better than the Piltdown man. You know, this is REALLY stupid on part of the science community. . . . What is going to happen is the exaggerations are going to be found out, fully exposed, for all the world to see. Science is going to take a blow to its credibility, and then what do you think the next development will be? Yep, opportunistic creationists are going to use that to get more of a foothold. . . . What [the science side] should do is back off from their claims that evolutionary theory is all but proven and admit where every, single solitary gap and problem is with the theory. It’s like the trial lawyer who knows his client has credibility issues and so brings them out before the opposing side can.
(continued in next post) 
I found that site (it wasn't too hard using the phrase "lifting functional constraints through duplication"), because I had to find out who was writing that. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evohome.html It's wrong, just plain wrong. And it's funded by agencies that should know better and make it sound like it's an authority for teachers. 
How can we ever teach this properly to the public when there's just so much misinformation floating around and coming from authoritative sounding sources? Sorry, I think I just need to cry some more. 
